The conference room holds two types of exhaustion. At one end, someone who’s been with the company for thirty years takes notes on a legal pad during hour three of a meeting that could have been an email.
At the other end, someone who started last month stares at their laptop, crafting a resignation letter they’ll post to LinkedIn before the day ends.
Same broken system, opposite responses. While Gen Z workers are “crashing out”—dramatically quitting, posting tearful TikToks about burnout, or simply vanishing from jobs mid-shift—their Boomer colleagues are doubling down on workplace rituals that younger workers find incomprehensible. The contrast isn’t just about age. It’s about fundamentally different relationships with work itself.
The divide plays out daily in offices, retail floors, and Zoom calls across the country. One generation treats work like a marriage that must be preserved at all costs. The other treats it like a bad first date—why stay for dessert when the appetizer made you sick? Neither approach is wrong, exactly. Both are responses to a workplace that increasingly serves no one particularly well.
1. They’re still printing everything
Walk past any Boomer’s desk and witness the paper fortress: printed emails, physical calendars, handwritten notes on printed PowerPoints. Last week, I watched a colleague print a digital signature page, sign it with a pen, scan it back in, then email it—a digital-analog-digital loop that defied physics.
For Boomers, physical documents feel real, substantial, provable. They came of age when “get it in writing” meant actual writing. The paper is proof of work, evidence of effort, a tangible artifact of their labor. The filing cabinet is their cloud storage, accessible even if the power goes out.
Meanwhile, many Gen Z workers are screenshotting everything—but for entirely different reasons. They’re not creating paper trails; they’re creating digital evidence for the group chat, the exit interview, or the eventual “why I quit” post. One generation documents to prove they worked; the other documents to prove why they’re leaving.
2. They attend every meeting, no matter how pointless
Boomers possess an almost religious devotion to meeting attendance. They’ll sit through quarterly reviews for departments they don’t work in, town halls that repeat last week’s town hall, and “quick syncs” that last ninety minutes. They arrive five minutes early with printed agendas, stay five minutes late to chat, and take notes they’ll transfer to a physical planner.
The meeting divide illustrates competing philosophies about presence versus productivity. Boomers equate showing up with commitment, visibility with value. They learned that careers were built in conference rooms, that being seen mattered as much as being productive. Their Gen Z colleagues, raised on efficiency culture and remote work, see most meetings as theft of their finite existence. They’ve calculated that their hourly rate divided by meeting minutes equals a sandwich they could have eaten instead.
3. They refuse to abbreviate anything
Boomers write emails like letters home from war. Complete sentences, proper punctuation, signatures that include their full name, title, phone number, fax number (still), and sometimes a motivational quote about excellence or teamwork. They’ll spend twenty minutes crafting a response that could have been “yes.”
I once received a three-paragraph email from a Boomer colleague that essentially said “okay.” It included a greeting, a restatement of my question, an acknowledgment of receipt, confirmation of understanding, agreement to proceed, next steps (there were none), a closing statement about collaboration, and a signature block longer than most Gen Z résumés.
Their younger colleagues have reduced workplace communication to its barest essence. The same exchange would be a thumbs-up emoji, maybe a “bet” if they’re feeling verbose. While Boomers see careful communication as professional respect, Gen Z sees it as performative waste. They’re not being rude—they’re being efficient in a workplace that demands too much of their time already.
4. They volunteer for everything
Watch a Boomer’s face light up when asked to lead the office holiday party planning committee—unpaid, after hours, and thankless. They’ll volunteer for weekend inventory, mentor new employees on their lunch breaks, and cover shifts for people they don’t even like. They accumulate responsibilities like scout badges, each one proof of their indispensability.
This isn’t just generational work ethic—it’s learned behavior from an era when extra effort led to advancement. They’re still operating under the rules of a game that ended years ago. Going above and beyond once meant job security and eventual promotion. Now it means doing three jobs for the price of one while the company posts record profits and prepares layoffs.
Gen Z watches this dynamic with horror and bewilderment. Work for free? Volunteer for tasks outside their job description? They’re already doing unpaid emotional labor by pretending to care about company culture. When asked to do more, they ask what they can do less of to compensate. It’s not laziness—it’s boundaries.
5. They stay loyal to companies that forgot their names
Perhaps nothing illustrates the generational divide more starkly than loyalty. I know Boomers marking their twenty-fifth work anniversary at companies that eliminated their pensions, outsourced their departments, and can’t remember their names without checking the directory. They wear company-branded fleece vests to grocery stores on weekends, defending management decisions that actively harm them.
Gen Z treats employment like they treat streaming services—cancel anytime, no explanation needed. They’ve watched their parents get downsized, restructured, and “right-sized” out of existence. Corporate loyalty, to them, is like believing in Santa Claus—sweet if you can manage it, but ultimately a fantasy that sets you up for disappointment.
The loyalty gap reflects fundamentally different employment contracts. Boomers entered a workplace that promised stability for dedication. Gen Z entered one that promises nothing, so they promise nothing in return.
6. They believe work friends are real friends
Boomers organize retirement parties for colleagues they’ve known thirty years, maintaining the polite fiction that these relationships will survive beyond the parking lot. They share personal details in break rooms, bring homemade cookies to meetings, and genuinely believe their work families care about their actual families.
Younger workers maintain clearer boundaries between work and life. They’re friendly but not friends, pleasant but not personal. They’ve seen too many “work families” dissolve the moment someone’s productivity drops or budgets tighten. Their real friends don’t control their health insurance.
Yet there’s something heartbreaking in both approaches. Boomers investing real emotion in relationships constrained by hierarchy and economics. Gen Z protecting themselves so carefully they miss genuine connections. Sometimes, watching a Boomer organize a lunch for a younger colleague who will ghost the job next week, you see the collision of hope and reality in real time.
7. They think the company handbook matters
The most telling Boomer workplace behavior might be their faith in official policies. They file formal complaints with HR, cite the employee handbook like scripture, and believe performance reviews lead to promotions. They’re following rules in a game where everyone else is playing Calvinball.
Gen Z doesn’t bother learning the official rules because they’ve noticed they don’t apply equally. They navigate workplace politics through whisper networks, Reddit threads, and TikTok advice. They know HR exists to protect the company, not them. Their employee handbook is the group chat where they share salary information and warn each other about toxic managers.
Final words
The tragedy isn’t that one generation works too hard while another hardly works. It’s that both responses make perfect sense given what work has become. Boomers cling to workplace rituals because abandoning them means admitting the social contract they built their lives on was a lie. Gen Z crashes out because they never believed in the contract to begin with.
Last month, I watched a sixty-year-old colleague train a twenty-two-year-old replacement, knowing the company was pushing her toward early retirement. She prepared detailed binders, created process documents, stayed late to ensure a smooth transition. Her replacement listened politely while updating his LinkedIn profile on his phone. Two weeks later, he’d left for a better offer. She’s still there, still printing emails, still believing.
Between the filing systems and the ghosted exit interviews, between the printed emails and the ignored handbooks, lies an uncomfortable truth: the workplace fails both those who believe in it too much and those who don’t believe in it at all.
Boomers exhaust themselves maintaining systems that no longer serve them. Gen Z exhausts themselves refusing to engage with systems that never intended to serve them.
Maybe the answer isn’t in either approach but in recognizing what both reveal—that work, as currently constructed, is broken for everyone. The Boomers know it but can’t admit it. Gen Z admits it but doesn’t know what comes next. Somewhere between printing every email and burning every bridge lies a better way of working. We just haven’t found it yet.
